Given the extent to which I used Busby Berkeley as a cudgel to beat up on the staged version of 42nd Street that I recently saw in a PBS Great Performances program, I figured that I might do well to see if I had been viewing the past through rose-colored glasses. Fortunately, the On Demand service provided by the Turner Classic Movies channel gave me the opportunity to so do. I just finished watching the original 42nd Street film. I realized that, not only can I not get enough of it, but also each viewing reveals details I had not previously recalled.
To be fair, however, this time I felt I had gained as much from Lloyd Bacon’s direction of the entire film as I had from Berkeley’s approach to the many musical numbers. While the PBS version made the original script by Rian James and James Seymour look like one of those abbreviated accounts that used to be found in Reader’s Digest, the team behind the original film knew that, however much the audience may enjoy all the song-and-dance routines, people, as a rule, went to the movies to be told a good story. In 42nd Street the story may not be “high literature;” but it has a narrative that provides a perceptive (if not exaggerated) account of how a show is made, rich diversity of character types, and a clear-eyed (if not merciless) perspective on the impact of the Great Depression.
The first encounter between director Julian Marsh (Warner Baxter) and his soon-to-be protégé Peggy Sawyer (Ruby Keeler)
Most important is that, while the stage version builds up sympathy for Julian Marsh, the director of the show being produced in the overall narrative, by giving him several of the songs, in the film Marsh, played by Warner Baxter, is all business and demanding to a point that these days might well be called abusive. At the end of the staged version, Marsh emerges as just one of the brighter lights on Broadway; but in the film we first encounter him in questionable physical shape. Then in the final scene we see him in a clearly depressed state, totally ignored by everyone leaving the show that they just enjoyed.
The other element to Bacon’s credit is a rapid-fire pace with comic turns coming out like bullets from a machine gun. There used to be a joke about the Judson Poets’ Theatre that no one in the audience would ever laugh at a comic turn: they were afraid that their laughter might obscure a follow-up that was even funnier. That is the sort of pace that Bacon brought to the delivery of the dialog in the script. (Sometimes having access to a rewind control absolutely necessary.) In the PBS version everything was declaimed, leaving plenty of room for laughter that was never particularly inspired.
As to Berkeley’s choreography, everything I wrote yesterday about his sophisticated approaches to geometry was as dazzling as I had remembered. I also discovered that there actually was a scene that involved mirrors, but it did not last very long. Rather, it was consistently all about the dancers and the almost never-ending sequence of patterns they unfolded. The songs may have been a bit hokey. However, the delivery always had a foundation of sincerity, even if that foundation disclosed a somewhat silly perspective. Nevertheless, it was the visual experience that mattered. There was never a moment when an attentive viewer might feel that Berkeley had run out of ideas; and it was, for all intents and purposes, impossible for the eyes to drift off the screen. Finally, in sharp contrast to the Great Performances telecast, nothing every felt as if it was going on for too long!
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